I learned new terms today: filter words and weasel words. In short:
- Filter get in the way of prose and distance the reader from the action. They make it easy for the writer to tell the reader what’s going on instead of showing them. “The dog seemed agitated waiting for her owner,” instead of “The dog paced in front of the bay windows waiting for her owner.” “The pretty girl looked uninterested in the guy asking for her number,” instead of “The pretty girl ignored the guy asking for her number.”
- Weasel words leave text feeling ambiguous. “He might be the hero’s brother.” “The body may have been stolen.” “The dog could have eaten the roast.” These sentences don’t help tell the story because the weasel words (in bold) render the text meaningless. “He might be unrelated to the hero.” “The body may be right where we left it.” “The dog could have ignored the roast and slept.”
Removing these cleans up the prose and makes it more interesting. A post on Scribophile suggested writing a macro in Word to detect these words and flag them but, since I don’t use Word, that doesn’t help me. Instead I implemented the same functionality in sh.
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